On Paul Masons Post-Capitalism An extended review

David Tyfield, Lancaster University

September 2015
Part 1: Overview
Paul Mason is not an economist by training, and it shows. 1 For how else could he have
written such an imaginative, insightful and stirring book on economics? After charting the
ongoing global turbulence in clear and fiery prose over the last few years in his two versions
of Why Its [Still] Kicking Off Everywhere, Mason has turned his evident passion for social
justice and his coal-face experience of the profound changes in global political economy to a
project that is politically grander and theoretically bolder. The result is Post-Capitalism, a
landmark publication of ambitious theoretical synthesis that also asks Big Important
Questions about what the information revolution means for humanity and the future of
capitalism as dominant political economic system that are basically totally absent in more
polite policy and/or academic discussion. And, most impressively, it does so with Masons
trademark succinctness and clarity of exposition.
Almost as proof of its importance, it has been systematically dismembered in reviews in the
British press; they did at least need to notice it! These reviews, however, do not even begin to
respond to Masons arguments, instead stooping to predictable ad hominem attacks (his
shrill tenor) or simply blasting back with a blunt restatement of the reviewers own politics
(e.g. the problem with the financial crisis was not enough market, not too much). By
contrast, this review wants to give Mason the engagement he deserves. This means there is
too much to say in a single piece of readable length. Instead, this response a critical
response, in fact will be divided up over several pieces to appear as blogs in coming weeks.
This first piece, then, by way of an introduction and overview, we will do three things here.
First, a brief summary of the structure and conclusions of Masons argument. Secondly, a
short list of some of the most important points Mason makes. And finally, an overview of the
substantive criticisms that will be developed in the remaining blogs.
The structure of the argument
Post-Capitalism is effectively structured around four arguments and/or theories. First,
Mason calls upon a variant of the Kondratiev theory of long waves of capitalist growth.
The variation he inserts is the importance of understanding this rhythmic process in terms that
take seriously political (economic) contestation. Hence resistance to a given phase of
capitalist growth is not merely a predictable side-effect that must be historically worked
through, perhaps as part of the birth pangs of an upswing, but is constitutive and irreducible.
For without such resistance, capitalists in pursuit of opportunities for competitive profit are
not compelled to pursue the kind of radical socio-technical and socio-political innovation that
make up the new upswing and subsequent Golden Age. Instead they can continue to
pursue the easy option of tightening the screws of existing mechanisms of exploiting their
workforce in order to eke out a profit, even as the system tends to stagnation.
Through this lens, then, Mason argues that a new wave should now have emerged, given the
demise of the last wave and the empirical periodicity of the process as a whole. Yet, using
especially a series of interesting graphs (on which more later), Mason argues instead we are
amidst an historical anomaly the exceptional extension of a downswing that has endured
1

Nor am I, I should add.

now some 20 years beyond its proper date of death. To Mason, this shows that the cycle is
broken, and with it the dynamic of the capitalist growth engine that is the cycle of long waves;
hence the turbulence, stagnation and general disorientation of the present. Capitalism needs a
new upswing for it to survive. Yet none has emerged, for some two decades now. The
reason for this, according to Mason, is ironically precisely the global triumph of capitalism
under neoliberalism. For the destruction of the working class (of the Global North), which
has been this victorys primary means and end, was also the destruction of the most
powerful socio-political mechanism forcing the renewal of capitalism, as just described.
Masons discussion on this point, and on working class history more generally, is amongst
the best parts of the book.
Secondly, though, not only has capitalism not yet changed, but nor is it pregnant with a new
upswing. To the contrary, the complex of socio-technical innovation that neoliberalisms
long down-swing has actually generated i.e. the ICT revolution is systematically
incompatible with capitalist relations of production. To make this argument Mason calls on
two further economic theories, again at radical odds with the neoclassical mainstream. First,
he explores theories of information economies and information capitalism. Information is
an ever-increasing part of economic activity and value, including as the catch-all accountancy
term of goodwill on corporate balance sheets. Following many other (high-profile) scholars,
Mason conceptualizes information as intangible, non-appropriable, non-rival and hence
now enabled by ICTs and the internet free in the double sense of freely circulating (as in
free speech) and with a marginal cost of (re)production (hence price) that tends to zero (as
in free beer). In short, the very technological productivity of capitalism, still constantly
revolutionizing the means of production, has now produced cutting-edge transformations in
those means of production that also systematically undermine the price mechanism on which
competitive profit through the market utterly depends. Developments in use value undermine,
rather that renew and expand, exchange value. In these circumstances, then, we can see how
the harder capitalism tries to renew itself, the more it simply deepens its crisis. No wonder no
new long wave has emerged.
Yet to this Mason adds a further argument for the impossibility of an information capitalism,
based upon an orthodox Marxian economics, founded in the labour theory of value (LTV).
Following the LTV, Mason notes how capitalist profit is actually the appropriation by
capitalist employers and financiers of (surplus) value produced always and only by waged
labour. This appropriation happens primarily under cover of fair market exchange of work
for a wage, where the worker is paid for the value of their labour power (expressed in the
value of the basket of goods and services needed for their daily reproduction) but is employed
for i.e. consumed as the value contributed by their actual labour (time). The exchange
values of the use values produced by capitalist production processes are thus the combination
of the exchange value (in socially-necessary labour time) of the labour, living and dead (as
embodied in material means of production), that they incorporate. This seeming digression
into arcane theory, however, serves a particularly important purpose. For understanding this
process, and the systematic way in which prices (as exchange values) interact across a
capitalist economy, illuminates further the challenges of information capitalism.
For Mason, the booming of information and information-based production, including
software, big data, interconnected materialities (the internet of things) and learning
machines, is not just the latest revolutionizing of the means of production, the next step in a
familiar process now several hundred years old. Rather, the information revolutions
tendency to zero marginal costs combined with the fundamental capitalist mechanism of
2

harnessing and appropriating the value of labour in production processes tends to the
progressive and relentless destruction of the capacity of the market to coordinate political
economic activity. First, the increasing use-value importance of information to production
processes translates into falling prices for those commodities, as competitive advantages and
monopoly pricing are undermined by informations free circulation. The reduction in
commodity prices, however, in turn reduces the cost of the basket of goods and services that
adds up to the wage. The exchange value of labour thus also falls. And this is then combined
with the progressive replacement of labour with high-(information)-technology that is itself
increasingly cheap, and often cheaper (hence cost-saving in austere times) than workers.
Put this together, though, and capitalism enters a death spiral, for the combination of everreducing inputs by labour AND ever-falling value of labour is to destroy the central motor of
the expansion of capitalism, namely increasing production of value. If the value input of
labour is declining and attempts to rectify this (i.e. more innovation) simply accelerate the
devaluation of labour, there is no escape from the stagnation and demise of a system that is
systematically dependent upon endless growth.
Moreover, capitalist enterprises, in their individual pursuit of short-term competitive gain, are
meanwhile busily constructing the technologies of an information economy that are
increasingly affording spontaneous political economic coordination outside the market. For
Mason, in short, the inexorable and accelerating movement which the labour theory of
value can explain while mainstream economics cannot even begin to conceive is towards a
political economy that prioritizes use-value over exchange value. This is an economy
more accurately a society or social formation, the idea of a standalone economy itself a
peculiarly capitalist notion that is increasingly not only capable of being organized by way
of voluntary knowledge input and labour; but also one that is, conversely, impossible to
coordinate and run on the basis of capitalist employment for production of commodities to be
sold for a profit. So, argues Mason, arises post-capitalism.
Mason does not end here, though. Rather this is just the start of the political project he is
trying to seed and cultivate. For the emergence of post-capitalism from the Pyrrhic victory of
neoliberalism needs agency. Realizing the end of capitalism demands a social force actually
to seize the reins of power. One may expect, given the Marxian resources used to this point,
that the identity of this social agency would be obvious. Mason, however, makes a distinct
and compelling break with his own orthodoxy at this point, arguing that post-capitalism will
not be constructed by the working class. Indeed, going further, he argues that Left-wing
movements seeking to expedite the emergence of a progressive information post-capitalism
must do some profound rethinking of political shibboleths. What is needed instead is the
construction of a new global social 2.0 movement, focused not on communal identities as
exploited workers but on new and dynamic collective identities as enabled and emancipated
and interconnected persons, enjoying the abundance and leisure of an equitable and socially
just information society. On this point, then, Mason presents some speculations regarding
how the political economy of this post-capitalist utopia could be organized, before finishing
with an extended discussion of how we get from here to there and what such a transition
could involve.
Many strengths and insights
It is clear that the summary above does not do full justice to this rich and thought-provoking
book. To be clear, then, this is a book that deserves to be read, and read from cover-to-cover.
And this because you will disagree with parts (or much) of it, not just because you will be
3

enlightened by its answers. It is, in short, a crucial opener in ongoing discussions of

exceptional importance. And Mason himself commendably seems to see it this way. In the
same spirit, the following initial responses are way-stations in an ongoing discussion and
markers as an overview of the fuller responses to follow in due course in subsequent posts.
First, against many commentators who take offence with the wide-ranging and imaginative
synthesis of unapologetically heterodox theories, I find Masons choice and use of theoretical
structure for his argument informed, informative and sensible. It seems by far the greater
error in this moment of unquestionable political economic turbulence to remain timidly
locked within an orthodoxy that admits only a timeless economy of markets of physical
goods tending to equilibrium, than to stride out and experiment with bolder, more political
and more historical theories of the evolution of capitalism. Indeed, the former is simply
incapable of even beginning to make sense of what are transparently the most radical
transformations in purely economic matters namely the explosion of the production of
information and the centrality, as never before, of innovation to corporate, national and
individual economic prosperity let alone the evident and profound social and political
transformations wrought by these economic changes. The sheer dominance and stagnation
of the economic mainstream in the academy still, after the intellectual debacle of the
complete failure to foresee the financial crash of 2008 may well mean that only a complete
outsider, a journalist and one without an economics training but still respected widely for his
political economic journalism, could make this kind of argument and get a decent hearing. In
this case, heterodox economists owe a debt of gratitude to Mason for forcing these issues into
public discussion, regardless of more nuanced or detailed disagreements with his particular
schema.
To this major pro, we may add a short list of important substantive points that Mason makes.
First, he argues compellingly that neoliberalism is bust yet undead, offering no way out of the
current global malaise but only deeper and deeper system dysfunction. Secondly, he
proposes a conception of neoliberalism as a complex political economic system, thereby
opening up thinking not only beyond the economics mainstream but also beyond the Marxian
political economic orthodoxy. This conceptual reframing is crucial given his third key point,
namely his insistent demand that we grapple seriously with implications of the information
revolution (or, we should say more accurately information communication revolution) for
major issues of social organization regarding political economy and human subjectivities.
Fourthly, Mason is also persuasive that a major reason for the need to do this thinking is that
the information revolution, while the product of neoliberalism, profoundly challenges this
(now common sense) form of political economy because of the qualitatively greater
challenges of appropriation and, hence, market pricing of intangibles. Combined then with
the first point above, it is understandable and legitimate that Mason seeks insights regarding
the broader historical trajectory and rhythmic of capitalism.
This then leads to several more strengths of his argument regarding his deployment and
changes to long wave theory. This includes two important criticisms of the seminal work of
Carlota Perez, the most influential of recent exponents of the Kondratiev wave. First, Mason
is quite right to insist on the constitutive nature of political agency in the course of
capitalisms history. This point really matters. Too often we read of how the early
turbulence and possible worsening of the lot of the masses in a techno-economic cycle is
merely a phase of immaturity that works itself out in the end almost as a matter of natural
development like the imbalance of an adolescence. Today this is true of techno-fetishist
discourses from cheerleaders of Silicon Valley and from more Left-leaning academic
4

evolutionary economists of system transition alike, and those in between, like Jeremy
Rifkin. But absent Masons emphasis on the central importance of political agency of
political and activist resistance to the given regime of capitalism in the very process of
maturing it is hard indeed not to read these wave or cycle theories as, at best, patronising
and, at worst, condemning and disempowering towards those who are clearly losers in the
new wave and are not going to take this lying down. In short, only by taking political agency
seriously, as does Mason, can we escape the fallacy that a new Golden Age is simply
guaranteed ex ante by the natural periodicity of the long wave cycle and the Call to
Passivity and Inaction this effectively counsels.
This leads directly to the second, more-or-less explicit, criticism of Perezs work that Mason
rightly makes. Namely that there really is no empirical evidence to hand that the last cycle
ended in 2001 (or was it 2008 or?) and a new one is now palpably emerging. By contrast,
Perez has repeatedly called this moment over the last 15 years, and done many a theoretical
jig in the process, but still to no avail. The empirical record thus corroborates the theoretical
and political objections just made in disputing Perezs interpretations.
Finally, Masons clear-eyed focus on the political challenge and his brilliant theoretical
artlessness also then allow him the leeway of further insightful heterodoxy in his determined
split from the working class as the agents of History. For Mason the journalist, no doubt, this
is simply nothing but the reporting of empirical fact. Having reported on massive, profound
and lasting unrest from places across the world in the last decade, he has witnessed for
himself how resistance to neoliberalism is ubiquitous and proliferating. Yet it is simply not
the resistance of a unified industrial working class, national let alone international. Indeed, to
the contrary, what remains of the latter are de facto politically conservative in many way;
both in their inability to challenge austerity, given their significantly weakened state after 30
years of neoliberalism, and in the clinging of their membership to lives of now unusually
privileged steady work and debt- and asset-based (moderate) prosperity that are
indissolubly wedded to the neoliberal system even as this segment of global society is the
unquestioned absolute loser of that system (as Mason shows) and a continuing target for its
further squeezing.
So Mason is about as well placed as anyone in the world to be able to write informatively
about what unifies the disparate groups actually contesting the violent death throes of
neoliberalism. And his argument that we must look instead to the kinds of person being
constructed in the crucible of the information society and economy is surely spot on. For it
invites the kind of open-minded reimagining of the human condition that can both begin to
grapple with the potentially profound transformations to society that a move beyond
capitalism in an information age may very probably involve, and just as importantly, the
many possible lines of strategic intervention that may be possible and/or necessary. Finally,
then, his call for a meso-level and practically- and politically- engaged theory, iteratively
illuminating this growing movement and contributing to its self-consciousness, is also
thoroughly compelling. (It is also, we may add, far more in keeping with the spirit of Marx,
the primary narrator and organic intellectual of an entirely new emancipatory movement of
his time the (presumptively international) working class than is the desiccated
reproduction of a dead Marxist orthodoxy.)
Some criticisms to be argued in more detail
These many strengths notwithstanding, though, Post-capitalism is a book whose problems
are many and interesting. Many of these reside not in Masons theoretical boldness, whether
5

in his use of heterodoxy, his synthesis of these theories or his own twist on them, but in the
particular theoretical choices and interpretations he makes. Moreover, these lead him to draw
conclusions that are often too quick or over-stated with potentially problematic political
implications. To be clear, therefore, the following criticisms come not from a position of
political antipathy to Masons evident distaste (even disgust) with capitalism, nor to his
impatience and fervour for a better alternative. To the contrary, these are shared and,
indeed, the vehement and urgent advocacy in Masons delivery that is so awkward and
inappropriate to other reviewers is for this one a key element of Masons persuasiveness.
Rather, these criticisms are based in great sympathy for Masons broader project but also a
determination to ensure it is as strategically enabled and informed as possible. This leads, for
me, to rejection of four of Masons major conclusions.
First, and against his arguments about (and specific interpretations of) information economics
and the labour theory of value, capitalism is not about to implode. To the contrary, a highly
productive and even revolutionary information capitalism is perfectly conceivable, even
when taking on fully the objections Mason presents. Moreover, and more generally, it is a
strategic error of the worst kind for the Left to latch on to the idea that this time the crisis of
capitalism really is terminal. I will argue this is simply strategically self-defeating wish
projection. For, even if (repeat, if) capitalism is about to die, the relevant question becomes
not will it or not? and why (do we know that)? but how? All analyses that focus on
proving the imminent end of capitalism, however, systematically distract the attention of the
radical imagination into politically sterile debates of the former kind, leaving the essential
strategic question of what do we do then? as permanent after-thought, a question always for
the next discussion. To be as blunt as possible, and a bit provocative to boot, even if
capitalism ended, a Left obsessed with diagnosing its demise would be utterly and swiftly
outmanoeuvred by precisely the self-seeking and powerful forces it would be hoping to
displace. The Left would thus be proven right (at long last!) about the end of capitalism
only to be immediately proven equally conclusively irrelevant. In short, the end of capitalism
is not the question for the Left, but rather its most dangerous and self-defeating obsession.
Secondly, and following directly on, just as an information capitalism is theoretically
possible, it is also highly likely; and, certainly, far more likely in the short/medium-term of
what happens next, given the current strategic landscape of power relations, than is a postcapitalism of the kind Mason describes and advocates. We will argue this by taking issue
with Masons other major theoretical pillar: Kondratiev waves, which will be contrasted with
a more informative, and explicitly political, periodicity building on the work of neoGramscian historical sociologist Giovanni Arrighi. On this conception, post-capitalism is not
imminent, nor waiting in the wings just waiting to be realized by a committed post-capitalist
movement that has understood its rationality. On the contrary, if it is ever to emerge, it will
take many decades, even generations, of political education and effort.
I repeat that this is not a conclusion I present because it is something I am advocating in
opposition to Masons advocacy of post-capitalism. To the contrary, this new and embryonic
information capitalism is a political economic regime and a form of global society that is
profoundly troubling in many ways. But with clear and growing evidence for its emergence,
there is all the more need for a strategic understanding of what it is and the strategic
challenges and opportunities it presents to shape a more socially and ecologically equitable
future than that presented by current, but substantially unchallenged, trajectories.

In other words, while this argument will accept that neoliberalism is busted, it will argue that
capitalism per se remains resilient and strategically productive, and hence the most likely
future (to mid-century at least) is not a post-capitalism, but a post-neoliberalism. Specifically,
this will likely be a new classical or laissez faire liberalism a liberalism 2.0 revived and
rejuvenated by the profound technological, epistemic and socio-cultural transformations
afforded by 2.0 social media and big data, complexity, and cosmopolitized social networks,
including crucially outside the erstwhile core of the US-centric Global North, not least
amongst the massive, populous and fast-developing countries of China, India, Brazil etc
This singular global transformation an uncompromisingly capitalist and even bourgeois
development is simply not tackled by Mason, leading to the highly parochial (both
geographically and as Left-wing partisan) conclusion that the demise of the Western working
class means the end of a meaningful challenge to the incumbent model of capitalism, viz.
neoliberalism. Whether you welcome it or not, in short, capitalism has plenty of life left in it
yet. And with stakes that have never been higher. Politically misleading and strategically
blinding talk of an imminent post-capitalism thus potentially bears a grievous burden of
responsibility.
This leads to the third major objection, at a higher level of abstraction, namely that the
information economys purported ushering in of an age of abundance does not per se equate
with solving the problems of social justice. We will challenge three specific sub-claims of
this argument (which also speak to the problematic but popular conception of the sharing
economy as inherently emancipatory): first, that the information society as currently
emerging does not in fact entail abundance but rather information capitalism, hence
systematic information concentration, control and inequalities; secondly, that the information
society per se does not even tend in the long run inevitably to abundance; and finally, that
abundance does not in any case equate with social justice. This last point hinges on the key
argument that social justice is not just a matter of nor therefore is it explicable or
researchable purely in terms of materialist political economy. Challenging the residual
prioritization of this lens in Masons choice of a Marxian theoretical base, therefore, we will
argue that social justice rather is a question of empowerment, not of just allocation, and that
this in turn points to key issues of power/knowledge relations that are not reducible to realist
issues of materialist economics, not even in the proverbial last instance.
From this perspective of meta-theoretical criticism, then, we make one final set of criticisms,
regarding Masons positive (rather than critical) suggestions regarding the form of a postcapitalism and the entire discourse of (prioritizing) the issue of transition, from here to (a
supposedly clearly understood) there. Drawing on questions of complex government of
complex systems, the inherent openness and uncertainty of (accelerating) socio-technical
innovation and the irreducibility of power/ knowledge, we will argue that the real strategic
challenge facing the Left today is even more profound than Mason argues but also much
more promising, albeit in the longer term.
It is more challenging because if the Left is not simply to be the radical foil and unwitting
handmaiden of a new and grievously iniquitous capitalism it must conclusively repudiate 19th
and 20th Left-wing orthodoxies of rational socialism and a foundationalist (but actually
groundless) faith in an Enlightenment politics. This is something that will only be achieved
by moving definitively beyond these often deeply buried tacit presumptions. This, in turn,
depends on the emergence of and shift to an alternative and strategically productive framing,
because the mind abhors a conceptual vacuum. Simple renunciation in words will not be
enough. So it is not something that will be achieved easily, but only through the painful and
7

slow process of embodied learning that is the transformation of subjectivities, commonsenses, lived practices, collectivities and institutional forms.
But it is also more promising because when one begins to move in this direction, namely
towards thinking and acting in terms of complex dynamic systems of power/knowledge, not
only do strategic openings appear for intervention here and now, not for the construction of
an always distant future utopia. But also the strategic imagination is liberated, perhaps even
giving the Left a strategic advantage it has not held for a generation, and certainly does not
hold now.
The next blog in this series will discuss the first set of criticisms, regarding the theory of
information economics and the labour theory of value.
David Tyfield (@DTyfield)
Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivative Works 3.0 UK: England & Wales
License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-ncnd/3.0/legalcode)